Zombie Fallout 2 (14 page)

“Mike let’s do this.” Brendon said saving me from the accusations, as he hefted up two riot shields. Covering most of his front and all of his sides he looked like the world’s largest beetle. I prayed that it would be enough.

“Just hit the hole hard and always keep your legs moving.” Travis the football player threw in for good measure.

“Alex you stay close in behind him. But if he gets stuck you have to come back.” I said, the implied meaning was obvious to everyone. If Brendon couldn’t break a hole through the zombies he would be at their mercy, and that was not an attribute they possessed.

I turned away embarrassed and yes I have to admit a little pissed. She would always be my little girl, if only in my memories, but that illusion was threatened every time I had to witness these intrusions into my fantasy world. It was much easier in my own world not having to think of my little princess doing adult things….much, much easier.

Nicole’s gaze of disappointment in me slid across my face, before she turned to go further back into the jailhouse, hesitant to witness firsthand the events that were about to shake out. No matter how this turned out Nicole and I had just come to a turning point in our relationship. No longer would she look to me as the man that could solve all of her problems, another tiny death suffered. Each one amounted to a paper cut on my soul, as they stood singly not enough to kill me but accumulatively would fray the vestiges of my humanity.

“Stay low.” I offered.

Brendon snorted twice, he was psyching himself up. The zombies pressed in on the bars their arms swinging wildly back and forth like speed metal concert-goers on crack. Brendon backed up ten feet to get as much speed going as was possible. Alex had a tough time keeping up encumbered in his extra clothing. The plan almost came to a screeching devastating halt as Brendon failed to heed my last words to him. The top right edge of his shield clipped the bars as he entered into the opening. His forward momentum spun him to the right. He had nearly toppled over and into the arms of the zombies. God, divine intervention, sheer blind luck, who fucken knows but something kept him from going over. Alex had just reached the opening as Brendon’s shield made first contact.

Ulnas, radii and humorous bones, first bent unnaturally, twisted perversely and then snapped normally. Brendon’s propulsion, even with the stumbling, easily took him halfway to his destination. I tried my best to equate the snapping of bones to that of wood being chopped. It didn’t work so well, more than one person in our group was sick from the explosion of noise. The forest of arms persisted though and I could see that Brendon’s initial inertia was slowing. The danger was that once the injured zombies retreated and their healthier brethren filled in the void any and all chance of escape would be cut off. We didn’t have the ammo or safe enough shooting angles to extract them. He would literally be four feet away but it might as well be four thousand. Alex sensing that they weren’t moving forward fast enough, plowed into Brendon’s back willing him forward through sheer sense of desperation and instinct. Miraculously or not some of the last zombies on the line pulled their arms out, most likely to try and prevent any unnecessary injuries. What would a good zombie doctor charge for a house call out in the country? A chicken brain at the least? A cow brain max.

Brendon stepped onto the truck’s running board placing his shield between the truck and the cage. It was a tight fit but Alex was able to get between Brendon and the bars to heft himself into the cab. Brendon quickly followed, dropping the shields down into the prying arms of the resurging enemy.

“Hope he’s got the keys.” BT said as he stepped up alongside me.

“Not fucking funny BT. Not fucking funny at all.” I knew it was a joke but the relief that flooded through me when I heard the truck engine turnover was palpable, if only to myself.

Brendon gave me the thumbs up sign. Now I knew it was our turn. Once that truck pulled away we would have seconds to clear the cage from the door, and judging by the added weight of all the zombies that were still tangled up in it this was not going to be easy. But is anything in life worthwhile ever easy, as my dad would say. I guess life is worthwhile, ergo it made sense that we should try as hard as we could to make this happen.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier if they tied the gate to the truck and just pulled it away?” Joann asked having come up to get a closer look.

Without turning to face her I answered. “Easier if it worked, disastrous if it didn’t.” I didn’t wait for her to ask the inevitable ‘How so?’ I kept rambling on. “If the gate doesn’t come straight out, there’s a good chance he’d rip the door frame right out of this building. No sense in having a door if we don’t have anything to close it on. Secondly the gate could get hung up under the truck and if that truck gets stopped…”

“I get the picture.” Joann answered. I could feel her shudder, the tiny fluctuations of displaced air rippled up my arms. I had sympathy shudders with her, that or someone had walked over my grave, which I hoped wasn’t in the nearby vicinity. Somewhere in Quebec would be cool. Hell Switzerland would be even better. I figured my odds of actually getting across seas were slim so if my grave was there…you see where I’m going with this right? Yeah me neither.

Brendon was still holding his thumb up waiting for my reply. I was not in such a rush to mess with the status quo. This status quo had us alive and who knows what was in store once we switched over.

“BT, Trav, and anyone else that thinks they can get a hand in here, let’s go.” I said as I placed my hands onto the gate. BT and Travis were immediately to my left and right sides. There were no other takers.

I nodded once to Brendon and turned to BT. “You remember we’re pushing right?”

He grimaced in response. I wasn’t happy. I’m into clear and concise not vague and gray like. The truck pulled away and for a fleeting moment I thought that was the end of us. The weight of the zombies pushing on the bars made it nearly impossible to move. I was resigned to becoming zombie chow, maybe if I was lucky some zombie chef would make a nice pate’ out of my liver. My knee literally screamed in protest. NO I mean I really heard it. Sure it was in my head but it was saying ‘DUDE WHAT ARE YOU DOING! THIS REALLY, REALLY HURTSSSSSSS!’, or something to that effect. Whatever ligaments were still precariously attached to my patella did everything in their power to stay attached and give me some forward thrust. But if not for the super human strength of BT we would have been sunk. Hell I probably could have been pulling against the bars and he still would have forced them through the doors.

The truck was no more than twenty feet away from the gate when some of the zombies that had graduated from Brain Rending And Intestine Nibbling (B.R.A.I.N.) University discovered there was a way in. The bars were moving but by fractions of inches (or millimeters for you more European thinking folks) point was that time was not on our side. I couldn’t decide if I should abandon my post and go on the defensive or keep pushing. BT was unaware of how close we were to our demise. His eyes were closed with the intense effort he was expending to move the behemoth gate. Zombies were in the gate and the lead one was eyeing me like I was the last McRib sandwich for the season. Eight feet equated to about a second and a half of sweet sweet life remaining.

Explosions ripped from below my waist, for one horrifying moment I really thought that the stress I was putting on my body had made me cut a hellacious fart. ‘Just fucking great, my last moments on Earth were going to be punctuated with a great gas blast. And then again maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.’ Another Monty Python reference. Me being the French and the Zombies being King Arthur. “I fart in your general direction!” (You should really try and find a backup generator so you can watch this movie in whatever shelter you have deemed safe enough to wait out Armageddon. But can you really wait out Armageddon? I mean just by its implied meaning, it’s the end of the world.) YES, in the millisecond it took for the explosion to register in my ears and then for me to realize that it was not the largest release of natural gas through my ass, all of the above went through my head. Curse or blessing, or a more strange mixture of both my mind is always approaching the speed of light. I’ll let you know when I can find the on/off switch. Another explosion shattered my thoughts or more likely coalesced the more important ones. I hastened a quick look down below me and saw something that was INFINITELY more scary than anything that was coming at me. A gun toting, man-hating lesbian carrying a huge pistol was situated in the one-kneed position between my spread legs firing off high caliber, high speed, genital-crushing rounds. I willed the bars forward. I wanted out of this predicament as fast as was humanly possible.

“MOVE!” Joann shouted from off to our right. I for one did not need to be told even once. I pulled Travis out of the way of the crashing door. The office shook as the door slammed home. My knees were shaking, mostly from the pain, but some, some of it was from Jen’s shooting.

“Looks like Mike just put a cork on a wine bottle.” Mrs. Deneaux said from off to the side of the room.

“Excuse me?” My wife asked her, in as nice a tone as she could contrive. But seething beneath the surface was a fury looking for a place to be unleashed. I didn’t say a word, lest that luminous ire shined my way.

Mrs. Deneaux took many moments to answer Tracy. She took two full inhales from her cigarette and answered on her second exhale, the smoke somehow punctuating her words. “I said, it looks like Mike just put a cork on a wine bottle.”

“I know what you said you old bat!” Tracy burned. (I was doing an imaginary fist bump with her, ‘You go girl!’) Mrs. Deneaux was made of stauncher stuff than I had given her credit for though. No one in their right mind would ever call Tracy anything but a petite woman, but with anger issuing forth from every pore in her body she looked like she could pull the sagging gray green skin right off of Mrs. Deneaux’s old bones. But yet the ‘old bat’ as Tracy so eloquently put it, didn’t bat an eyelash at Tracy’s harsh words.

“Oh honey.” Mrs. Deneaux rasped through her smoke tortured throat. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“The FUCK you didn’t!” Tracy screamed, her finger stopping just short of puncturing Deneaux’s larynx. This time Deneaux did step back. “All the good people that died, and you survived! That above every other fucked up thing that has happened proves to me there is no GOD!”

The entire room held its collective breath, even the babies. How the hell they knew what was going on, I don’t know. I went over to Tracy and grabbed her by the waist pulling her close to me, she sobbed softly on my shoulder.

“Really, I didn’t mean anything by it.” Mrs. Deneaux said to a room full of deaf ears.

The truck came back a few minutes later but it felt like hours. Time stretched worse than in a twilight zone episode. Mrs. Deneaux finally shuffled off to be with her nephew. Even he seemed reluctant to acknowlege her. Family duty though bound him to the task. He shrugged his shoulders at me. Whether to let me know ‘What can you do she’s an old cantankerous bitch?’ or ‘Don’t lump me in with this old cantankerous bitch?’ I wasn’t sure. We all turned as the familiar tell tale sign of a truck backing up impeded our individual conversations.

Thankfully (because I didn’t have to do it) or not (because he was a prick about it) Justin had the ill-temper to quash out whatever remnants of promise Joann hung on as he answered in my stead. “Because the inside of the gate is full of dead zombies and the outside is full of live ones.” He laughed, dark circles under his eyes lent menace to words.

“That’s all I meant.” Mrs. Deneaux said. Her nephew did his best to quiet her.

But yet the back-up beeping persisted. “Come on.” I said desperately. “Alex has to be thinking the same thing we are.

“Brendon!” My daughter screamed, not from terror but from concern. “What are you doing?” Almost like a well-trained platoon, all of the occupants of the room took up strategic placement with Nicole by the windows. Brendon was on the top of the truck with a rope and some sort of makeshift grappling hook. It looked like a crow bar, but it was tough to tell from all the rope that was tied around it.

I saw immediately what Alex and Brendon had planned. “That’s not going to work.” I said to myself.

“What’s not going to work?” BT asked.

“Watch.” I answered. BT didn’t seem all too pleased with my response. I don’t think he was big on surprises either. Really I hoped that what they had planned would work but physics wasn’t on their side.

Brendon lowered the ‘grappling hook’ down to the cage assembly. After a couple of tries and some errant zombies getting in the way, Brendon was able to snag the cage. “Alright got it Alex, go slow!” He shouted over his shoulder. As Alex placed the truck in gear there was one long second where we all held our breaths as Brendon nearly took a header. Nicole nearly fainted. Brendon quickly righted himself and gave us all a weak smile to let us know he was okay. Alex pulled ahead slowly as Brendon let slack out of the rope. Finally the truck had gone far enough that the true test of this experiment would come to its unfulfilling conclusion. The end of the rope was tied off to the truck’s rear bumper, I didn’t gauge that as being the problem area that or the rope itself looked heavy enough to leash a T-Rex. No the problem lied in the grappling hook assembly, without a hole to thread the rope through, no knot was going to be able to stand up to the forces applied to it.